Generally there exists a variety of different stacked assemblies and structures in the context of electronics and electronic products.
The motivation behind the integration of electronics and related products may be as diverse as the related use contexts. Relatively often size savings, weight savings, cost savings, or just efficient integration of components is sought for when the resulting solution ultimately exhibits a multilayer nature. In turn, the associated use scenarios may relate to product packages or food casings, visual design of device housings, wearable electronics, personal electronic devices, displays, detectors or sensors, vehicle interiors, antennae, labels, vehicle electronics, etc.
Electronics such as electronic components, ICs (integrated circuit), and conductors, may be generally provided onto a substrate element by a plurality of different techniques. For example, ready-made electronics such as various surface mount devices (SMD) may be mounted on a substrate surface that ultimately forms an inner or outer interface layer of a multilayer structure. Additionally, technologies falling under the term “printed electronics” may be applied to actually produce electronics directly to the associated substrate. The term “printed” refers in this context to various printing techniques capable of producing electronics/electrical elements, including but not limited to screen printing, flexography, and inkjet printing, through substantially additive printing process. The used substrates may be flexible and printed materials organic, which is however, not necessarily always the case.
For example, the aforementioned wearable electronics and generally wearable technology such as smart clothing fuses textiles, other wearable materials and electronic devices to make a wearer's life easier by implementing different aspects of ubiquitous computing for both private and business purposes in wearable items such as garments. Recent advancements in material technology and miniaturization have brought forward solutions that the users have only dreamed about a decade or two ago. Hard shell wearable technology such as various smart watches or generally wristop devices has been limitedly available for some time now starting from the 80's wristop calculator watches evolving into sports/fitness computers, activity monitors and most recently, various communications-enabled apparatuses approaching e.g. cell phones and tablets in terms of embedded features. Yet, few wearable smart glasses and e.g. personal security-related products have hit the markets since. Actual e-textiles or ‘smart textiles’ have also been introduced during the last few years with reference to fabrics that provided for integration with electronics such as sensory integration. The e-textiles may incorporate both electrically conductive materials, such as conductive yarn, and insulating materials for providing the desired electrical properties to the components embedded therewithin.
FIG. 1 illustrates one example of a multilayer structure 100 of integrated and embedded electronics. A substrate 102 is provided to accommodate a number of electronic components 104 and a number of conductor traces 106 for connecting the electronic components 104. Additionally, a top layer 108 is provided on top of the electronic components 104 and substrate layer 102 as a support structure using a suitable lamination method involving the use of e.g. adhesives, elevated temperatures and/or pressure.
However, one drawback of the prior art solution is that the electronic components 104 may easily crack or break when the top layer 108 is provided on top of the electronic components 104. In FIG. 1 a prospective crack in the component is illustrated with a dashed line 110. For example the regulation of the pressure/temperature to maintain it at a decent level during the lamination is challenging. If the pressure/temperature is too high the components 104 may crack or break, and on the other hand if the pressure/temperature is too low the composition of the top layer 108 turns out incorrect and/or the top layer is not attached properly, for instance. The cracking or breaking of the electronic components 104 during the manufacturing process cause increase in manufacturing costs for multilayer structural electronic devices. Therefore there exists a need for improving the manufacturing procedure of the multilayer structures for the electronic devices.